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On Tue, 7 Nov 1995, Robert Peter Burns wrote:
>> of non-essential goods and services. To give you an idea of what
> I mean: imagine pre-1985 Sweden, but with social ownership and
> workers' self-management added.
>
Louis: This is symptomatic of the myopia of market socialists. Pre-1985
Sweden, or any other welfare state, could not exist without the pillage
of the third world. European Social Democracy is much more civilized than
American dog-eat-dog styled capitalism, but both ultimately are based on
exploitation of the huge majority of the world's population in places
like Bengla Desh and Brazil. The Eastern Europeans who embraced Market
Socialism 10 years ago and who had such a major impact on the thinking of
Jim Roosevelt and David Belkin, authors of "Why Market Socialism", were
expecting that Hungary, etc. would end up looking like Sweden. Now Sweden
in 1995 is starting to look like Hungary while Hungary is starting to
look like Brazil. This is the reality. "Market Socialism" is simply a
trend. It, like postmodernism, will go out of style sooner or later the way
that Nehru jackets and Herbert Marcuse did. It is hard to entertain
illusions in such ideology when the misery of the marketplace causes such
suffering everywhere. Capitalist markets, socialist markets: it's nearly the
same in the final analysis.
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